Quick Fixes: Your Butt

Flat pancake booty or a huge badonkadonk, chances are, your glutes are inactive. This includes men.

Don't use something and it becomes less efficient, right? You end up a bit "rusty" when you don't do something for a while, like running. If you stopped for a few weeks, that first run after a long break isn't going to be as easy as it was before.

Driving, working, reading, on the computer, or anything else in the majority of our lives typically results with us sitting. A lot.

The work your glutes can be doing is transferred elsewhere on the body. That means, other muscles need to compensate for the lack of work being done by your ass. Literally.

Think about it like this. If you're working in a group on a new project and one person slacks off, everyone else has to pick up the slack. If you're like me, you probably don't want the extra work.

"What you gon' do with all that junk?"

So we need to counter that, y'know, get that junk in the trunk working again. Hm, what do we do?

Drumroll please.

*cricket chirps*

Yes folks, exercise! But, there are also some stretches and warm-ups in our bag o' tricks.

To keep this post short as possible, I'm going to list & hyperlink a few things.

• Standing hip flexor stretch, hold for 1 second, alternate between each leg & do 10 total.
  
• Bird dog
• Glute/supine bridge
  
• Jane Fondas (listed as lateral leg raise)
• Fire hydrants (listed as knee circle forward), aim to get your knee higher than the girl in the video.
  
• Pretty much any of the movements demonstrated in this video.
  

Do the first bullet point plus one of the others, not all of them. For amount of reps and sets, check out the chart in the bottom of this article.

For actual exercises, the list is endless. You should aim to make a strong lower body using a variety of squats, deadlifts, lunges, split squats, glute-ham raises, good mornings, step ups, sprints, and kettlebell/dumbbell swings.

Notice how slow long distance running isn't mentioned? Just make sure to get complete hip extension. That means at the end of each rep, be sure to lock and pop your hips out, you should be able to squeeze your glutes hard. (see here & here to get an idea)

To get that rump in shape, you need to work it.

For any of you interested, here are the articles I used.

• Mike Robertson & Eric Cressey's Get Your Butt Into Gear, parts 1 & 2
• Brijesh Patel's Hamstring Dominance article
• Chad Waterbury's Fast Track to a Hard Ass
• Rachel Cosgrove's Lift Heavy for Lean Legs
• Mehdi's How to Optimize Posterior Chain Power: Glute Activation

Hope you all enjoyed this post, feel free to leave questions and/or comments.